The wild diet notably improved gut health, overall well-being.
The impact of food on human health is somehow consistently overlooked. Despite having an obvious role in every aspect of human well-being, many people ignore the role food plays and will instead turn to other solutions – such as medications – to solve their health problems. Of course, medications play an important role in modern healthcare, but it all starts with what foods are allowed to go into the body. Against that backdrop, a recent study shines some interesting light on how humans interact with their food. It’s notoriously difficult to test the results of food on health in a scientific manner, since properly controlled studies are hard to execute, but this recent small project did lead to some interesting findings when it comes to eating only wild foods.
The study in question here was titled the Wildbiome Project, and that name says most of what needs to be known about the endeavor. There were 26 people involved, and their mission was to live on foraged wild food for a period of one to three months. This type of diet presents a number of challenges, obviously, including finding the sources of food and making sure that all foods are safe to eat.
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The diets that were consumed by those in the study consisted of things like mushrooms, rabbit, pigeon, wild greens, and fish, along with supplemental components like fruit and chicken eggs. Consuming this kind of diet is a radical change from the standard diet that is consumed by most people in the 21st century, so it is perhaps not surprising that the changes seen among the participants were rather radical, as well.
Over the period of the study, the participants lost an average of more than 12 pounds. For three months, one individual even lost 44 pounds of body weight. In addition to dealing with excess weight, this new diet seemed to also help dramatically with other health conditions. One of the participants reported that they were able to gain control over diabetes in just 10 days after making such a dramatic shift.
There was also a measurable improvement in the gut health of those who took part, speaking to the overall advantages of a foraged diet. Not only did the diversity of foods consumed seem to have a positive impact, but there is also the exercise element to considered. Since these individuals had to go find their own food, they were – by definition – going to be more active than if they just got their food from the store and didn’t have to track it down.
Is it realistic for the general population to mimic the lifestyle that was used by the participants in this study? No – probably not. But that doesn’t mean that this study lacks an important lesson. The clearest lesson here is the value of eating real food. So much of what humans today consume is not really food, but a reasonable copy of something that once was food. By getting back to the fundamentals of eating, millions of people would have the chance to become healthier and elevate their lifestyle accordingly.
Sources:
Really wild diets are found to boost foragers’ health
Experts stunned by results of ‘wild’ diet study and its effects on our health — here’s what they discovered
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